Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • June 2017 Gig Calendar

    Back in the U.S.A. at last!  I'm going to be keeping a very light teaching schedule with minimal travel this summer while I try to catch up on research and writing and various things I've neglected while living in Russia, but I'll be emerging from my warm-weather hibernation for a few little events here and there.

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    Friday-Saturday, June 9th-10th ~ East Durham, New York (Catskills)
    Steampunk in the Catskills III (Facebook event)
    Friendly, low-key steampunk weekend with two workshops in Victorian dancing at the Blackthorne Resort!

    Wednesday, June 14th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
    Jane Austen Era Dancing  (Facebook event)
    Beginner-friendly lesson 7:00-8:30pm.  Informal dancing, no costume needed.  

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  • Imperial Gavotte

    The Imperial Gavotte is one of the many schottische variations included in M. B. Gilbert’s book of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903).  It is attributed to Professor A. T. Graves of Albany, New York, and noted by Gilbert to have been accepted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing in New York on September 4, 1889.  The Society endorsement gave it enough exposure for it to turn up outside Graves’ own studio: in the October 26, 1890, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), it is listed as one of the new dances to be taught by John Mahler.

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  • May 2017 Gig Calendar

    This will be my final month of Russian residency, continuing my regular Moscow classes in cross-step waltz and American ragtime dance, plus at least one one-shot class in Moscow in nineteenth-century American contradance before I head home.  A couple of other things are in the works and may yet be added to this schedule, so check back as the month goes on!

    For Russian-language information and questions about my classes in Russia this spring, please see my VK community.

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  • American Gavotte / Polka Américaine

    The American Gavotte is another of the variations published by dancing master M. B. Gilbert in his manual of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and republished by G. W. Lopp in La Danse (Paris, 1903).  It was attributed by Gilbert to James P. Brooks of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (and by Lopp to “J.-D. Brooks”).  Gilbert also noted that it was adopted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York — this would have been in 1886, from contemporary writeups of the event — and published by permission of White Smith Music Publishing Co.  Lopp listed it as “Polka Américaine (American Gavotte)”

    I’ve discussed a couple of other American “gavotte” variations before, but both of those were for the schottische.  The American Gavotte is listed as a polka, though it actually works perfectly well to schottische music and there is some confusion surround how it is notated that suggests that it might have originally been meant as a schottische; see the music note below.  It certainly has some choreographic kinship with the schottische gavottes in that it also uses the rhythm pattern “1&2&3,4” stepped as “slide, chassé, chassé, close” or “slide-close-slide-close-slide, close”.  This is one measure of schottische as usually counted, but two measures of polka.  Because of the pattern of the following four beats of music, I actually prefer to break the first four up into two bars, polka style, as follows, with dancers starting on their first foot (his left, her right):

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  • Flower Girl’s Dance

    Flower Girl’s Dance is an American Civil War-era contra dance that I remember dancing way back in the early 1990s when I first started doing mid-nineteenth-century dance.  But the version we did does not actually match that found in any source I’ve ever seen.  And it’s easy to see why: the versions given in the sources don’t actually work very well.  And now that I’ve reconstructed the California Reel, I have a little theory about why that is.

    The earliest sources I have for Flower Girl’s Dance are Elias Howe’s two 1858 books, the Pocket Ball-Room Prompter and the Complete Ball-Room Handbook.  I strongly suspect that all the later sources were copying to some degree from Howe.  So let’s look at Howe’s instructions:

    FLOWER GIRL’S DANCE.
    (Music: Girl I left behind me.)
    Form as for Spanish Dance. All chassa to the right, half balance–chassa back, swing four half round–swing four half round and back–half promenade, half right and left–forward and back all, forward and pass to next couple (as in the Haymakers).

    There are some minor differences of spelling and punctuation, but the wording is essentially the same across almost forty years of Howe publications.  Taken at face value with the hash marks setting off eight-bar musical strains, this yields a 40-bar dance:

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  • California Reel

    There’s the famous Virginia Reel.  There’s a Kentucky Reel.  Why not a California Reel?

    Unlike those other two reels, which are full-set dances, the California Reel is a normal  progressive contra dance in the “Spanish Dance” format: couple facing couple, either down a longways set or in a circle.  For this particular dance, a line of couples will work better.

    I have five sources for California Reel, though two of them are simply later editions of other sources:

    • The ball-room manual, containing a complete description of contra dances, with remarks on cotillions, quadrilles, and Spanish dance, revised edition, presumed to be by William Henry Quimby (Belfast, Maine, 1856; introduction signed W. H. Q)
    • The ball room guide : a description of the most popular contra dances of the day, (Laconia, New Hampshire, 1858)
    • Howe’s New American Dancing Master by Elias Howe (Boston, 1882)
    • Howe’s New American Dancing Master by Elias Howe (Boston, 1892)

    All of them have the same language in the description, varying only in punctuation and spelling.  I am reasonably sure that the text in most of these sources was copied from either the 1856 source or some earlier source.

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  • The Western Normal Newport

    The Western Normal Newport was named after the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing, a professional organization for dancing masters in western North America.  “Normal school” sounds odd to modern ears, but historically, it didn’t mean what we’d imagine today.  A normal school was a teacher-training school, where the “norms” of teaching and subject material were taught; more information on normal schools in general may be found here.  The Western Association Normal School was founded in 1894 under Canadian dancing master John Freeman Davis, its first president.

    My only source for the Western Normal Newport is George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903).  Lopp was from the northwestern USA and may have been a member of the Normal School or at least aware of it.  The variation’s name, as given in French by Lopp, was Le Western Normal Newport, attributed to l’Association de l’École normale des Maîtres de danse de l’Ouest.

    Given that the school was founded in 1894, the Western Normal Newport was obviously created too late to appear in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in Portland, Maine, in 1890, from which Lopp cribbed so much of his own book.

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  • Ripple, Ripple, Jersey

    The Ripple Galop and the Jersey are two galop variations found in both M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), a French translation of Gilbert with some additions and changes.  Both variations use the late nineteenth-century American waltz-galop technique of a leap along the line of dance followed by a side step and a cut (or close of the feet) in the rhythm “1&2” rather than the slide-chassé of the galop, extending it into the “Newport” pattern of a leap along the line of dance followed by a series of side-closes, stretching the basic step-unit from one to two measures.  The key difference is where the side steps and closes fall relative to the strong beats of the music:

    galop:                  1 (side)                         & (close)    2 (side)
    waltz-galop:    1 (back/forward)    & (side)      2 (cut/close)

    The galop pattern ends in an open position.  The waltz-galop normally does as well, but it can also be ended elegantly at the end of the music by a close of the feet rather than a cut.  This alteration of the relationship of movements to music in dances of the “new waltz” family is what makes these variations interesting to me.

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  • April 2017 Gig Calendar

    Continuing my wonderful Russian residency, this month I'll be continuing my regular Moscow classes in cross-step waltz and American ragtime dance as well as making trips to Saint Petersburg and Vladimir to teach ragtime dance in those cities as well!  I'll also have a couple of one-shot classes for Moscow studios in ragtime dance and American Civil War-era contradance.  For Russian-language information and questions about my classes in Russia this spring, please see my VK community.

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  • Mr. Layland’s Polka Contre Danse

    There are at least five different dances in the second half of the nineteenth century whose name is some variation on the generic “polka country dance”.  The one I’m looking at here was published as both “Polka Contre Danse” and just “Polka Contre”.  Unusually, it is attributed to a particular dancing master, Mr. Layland, who was active in London in the mid-19th century.  I’ve mentioned him before in the context of his mescolanzes.  That makes it very much an English dance, despite its appearance in a couple of American dance manuals.

    My first English source for the Polka Contre Danse, The Victoria Danse du Monde and Quadrille Preceptor, dates to the early 1870s, but I suspect that it actually dates back to the 1850s.  It actually appears earlier in two of the manuals of Boston musician/dance caller/publisher Elias Howe, the earlier of which is from 1862.  Howe was a collector and tended to throw dances from every book he collected into his own works, so I suspect there is an earlier English source somewhere, possibly by Layland himself.  Maybe someday I’ll find it.

    Until then, on with Polka Contre Danse!

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  • Susan’s Sociables

    When I first wrote about the quadrille figure called the Sociable almost seven years ago, I noted that some sources offered slightly different sets of figures, and at least two suggested that the choice of figures was up to the caller:

    “No positive rule as to what figure shall be called in the Quadrille Sociable.  The choice is left entirely to the prompter.”  (Brookes, L. De G.  Brookes on Modern Dancing.  New York, 1867)

    “Prompters often call figures in the ‘Sociable’ to suit their fancy, introducing the ‘Star Figure,’ ‘Grand Chain,’ etc.”  (De Garmo, William.  The Dance of Society.  New York, 1875)

    I rarely exercise the option to call variant figures; my habit has been to do the most common four-figure sequence twice over, once for the ladies to progress and once for the gentlemen, with an eight-bar “All chassez” and honors coda at the end.  Including introductory honors, this calls for a structure of 8b + 32bx8 + 8b.  Working with live musicians, I can have music played to fit this pattern exactly.  Or, if I am using the Sociable as the final figure of a quadrille, the short version with the progressive figures done only once (ladies progressing) is plenty, and since 8b + 32bx4 + 8b is a common finale structure, if necessary, it is easy to find a recording with that pattern.

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  • March 2017 Gig Calendar

    After a quiet three months of teaching hiatus, I am back on the road this month…but all roads this spring will be Russian ones!  I'll be living in Moscow for the next few months and doing a few weekend events in Russia and Ukraine as well as experimenting with regular weekly classes.  If those listed below go well, then classes will continue once or twice a week through the end of May!  Updated: both cross-step waltz and ragtime classes will continue as subscription courses through the end of May!  PLUS: a nineteenth-century schottische and country dance class added in late March!

    For Russian-language information and questions about my classes in Russia this spring, please see my VK community.

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  • Early foxtrot: the drag step

    It’s been quite some time since I’ve written up any early foxtrot variations, so here’s a simple but stylish one from 1914 to add to your repertoire!

    Dancer Joan Sawyer, owner of the Persian Gardens nightclub in New York City, called this the “drag step”, but unlike the drag or draw steps found in other dances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feet are not just closed heel to heel.  Instead, the closing foot is tucked behind (his) or in front of (hers) the other.  Here’s Sawyer’s description of the drag step and the following “trot”, with the accompanying illustration at left:

    The gentleman slides the left foot out to his left as though he were going to walk sideways.  He then drags his right foot over back of the heel of the left foot, coming up slightly on the toes at the end of the movement, and breaks into a forward “trot” of four steps, gentleman starting the first trot step with is left foot…The lady you see slides her right foot out to her right, she then points the toe of her left foot over in front of her right foot, throwing her weight on to the left foot, then trots backward four steps, sliding the right foot back first.

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  • A Valentine Cotillion

    I return once more, in honor of Valentine’s Day, to H. Layton Walker’s delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), which is always guaranteed to provide me some interesting figures for imaginative dancers.  Christmas was a bit disappointing, as holiday cotillion themes go.  Valentine’s Day seems much more promising, since both cotillions and valentines have the goal of matching up people and thus ought to combine nicely!

    Starting from the top of an evening’s program, Walker does provide a couple of useful suggestions for the grand march.  I noted a few years ago that good leaders could get their marching dancers into formations such as the letters of the alphabet, or other geometric figures.  Hearts, for example, lend themselves easily to being both created and escaped from by lines of dancers.  Walker provided the diagrams at left for what he called a “Heart March Cotillion”, though the shape is so basic that one hardly needs the help.

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  • A St. Louis Hesitation Waltz (1914)

    The generically named One Step Hesitation is a short hesitation waltz sequence that appeared in the second edition of the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in late 1914.  It is subtitled “As Recommended by St. Louis Association Dancing Masters”, and with no author listed, may have come from the hand of Clendenen himself.

    Since the One Step Hesitation is almost entirely in the slowest possible type of hesitation (one step per bar of music), it calls for very fast waltz music or it will drag badly.  I prefer 180 beats per minute and up for this type of hesitation waltz.

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  • Waltzing Around

    A recent mailing list discussion centered on how to quickly teach people to do a "waltz-around", the style of country dance progression in which two couples waltz around each other once and a half times.  This is most famously part of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century Spanish Dance, as well as other American waltz contra dances (such as the German Waltz and Bohemian Waltz).  It dates back at least as far as the late 1810s to early 1820s in England, when Spanish dances were an entire genre of country dances in waltz time, and both they and ordinary waltz country dances featured this figure, sometimes under the names "poussette" or "waltze".  I expect it goes even further back on the European continent, but I haven't yet pursued that line of research.

    As a dancer, the waltz-around has always been one of those figures that I just…do.  I'd observed that it's difficult for beginners to master the tight curvature of the circle and making one and a half circles in only eight measures, but as an experienced waltzer, I've long been able to do it instinctively.  And I'd never broken down precisely what I did or worked out how to explain it to others.  

    So I suppose it's about time!

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  • Seasonal Cotillions

    Once more, some cotillions, this time to wrap up the year with midwinter cheer!  As with the North Pole figures, these are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Buffalo, New York, 1912).  This trio of figures is pure fun, however, with no special historical significance.  Three figures aren’t enough to comprise an entire party on their own, but mixed with standard, non-winter-themed figures, they add a nice seasonal touch.

    But first, let’s let’s decorate the ballroom with a winter theme…

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  • Seeking the North Pole…

    In honor of the freezing cold winter weather, I’m returning to H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) for a pair of cotillion figures themed around the then-current news of the attempts by explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook to be the first to reach the North Pole in 1908-1909.  At the time Walker’s book was written, there was a lively conflict going on between the two men as to who could claim the polar laurels.  Since then, both accounts have been discredited to varying degrees, but it seems to still be something of an ongoing debate among scholars.  There’s an interesting account of the two expeditions and the contemporary debate at the Smithsonian Magazine website, which I recommend for anyone wanting more historical perspective.

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  • Ladies leading, 1898

    Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about some of the tidbits of evidence of ladies or gentlemen dancing in same-gender couples in Regency-era ballrooms.  I’m returning to the topic of same-gender dancing with an interesting article I discovered in an issue of a late-nineteenth-century American dance magazine, The Two Step, published at the time by dancing master and author H. N. Grant, out of Buffalo, New York.

    The June, 1898, issue (Vol. 5, No. 47) includes a short essay on an important topic: “May a Lady Dance Backward.”  It opens with a strong statement in favor:

    Should a lady be taught to use the backward step in the waltz?

    Yes we say, most emphatically yes.

    That opens up all sorts of interesting questions, doesn’t it?  Were ladies not generally even taught to waltz backward?  Was that actually controversial?
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  • A miscellany of mescolanzes

    I don’t often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year.  Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I’ll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.

    As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can’t really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England.  But the format appears across enough different sources that I’m comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era.  I don’t ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.

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  • Giving thanks!

    It's that time of year again…the start of the (American) winter holiday season, and the culturally-ordained time to give thanks!

    This year a big thank-you goes to my wonderful Patrons, whose financial support of this blog through Patreon keeps me researching and writing as well as providing a level of emotional support that's really helpful for a freelancer during those times when I'm curled up alone trying to work and wondering if anyone actually values what I write or appreciates the enormous effort that it takes to blog for nearly nine years and well over a quarter-million words.  Your support says that you do, and that's valuable far beyond the money involved.

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  • Autumn 2016 Gig Calendar

    I continue to be on teaching hiatus, so the three events below (two in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in November and one in Kiev, Ukraine, in December) are the ONLY events I will teach at for the remainder of 2016.  

    Note that I will not be at Gettysburg this year!

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  • Boarding House

    Final cotillion figure for the month!  Boarding House straddles the line between comedy and horror, making it perfect for Halloween.  Along with being probably the single weirdest cotillion figure I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot, it’s also the most elaborate, requiring the construction of a special trick table along with props and costumes for some of the dancers.  The figure is taken from St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler’s 1900 compilation Original Cotillion Figures, in which it was attributed to Brooklyn dancing master William Pitt Rivers.  After reading through this figure, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to have him as my dancing master!

    I’ll include the full original description below, but since it is rather lengthy, I’ll start with the requirements and process for the figure.

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  • Red Ear Party, 1919

    The description of the Red Ear Party, or Harvest Home Party, appears in Emily Rose Burt’s Entertaining Made Easy (New York, 1919).  It was not a full-scale fancy dress ball, but an autumn/harvest-themed ball put on by, according to the book, a group of high school seniors as the opening event of their final year.  Along with normal dancing of the era, it featured a series of novelty dances which were effectively low-key cotillions.  Did the event really take place or was it imagined by Ms. Burt just for the book?  Hard to say.  But I’m impressed with the imagination and industry either displayed by the actual students or expected by Ms. Burt to be achievable by high school kids.  I wish my teenage school dances had been like this!

    The red ear of the title was not a body part but an ear of corn.  The significance is said to go back to a colonial tradition in which whoever found the red ear at a corn husking party would get to kiss the girl of his choice.  (You can see an example of one red ear among a lot of normal ones here.)  In this case, finding the (faked) red ear was used to select a “queen” for the party.

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  • Prince Leopold’s Birthday Ball, 1859

    One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859.  This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today.  That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.

    The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859.  The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates.  The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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